166 Apokatastasis: Four Meditations
verse of light. Sooner or later, the rational will must exhaust
even its furthest reaches.
In my experience, as it happens, this last line of reasoning
is the one of Gregory's that seems the most exotic and logically
fragile to many modern readers. This is unfortunate, inasmuch
as the argument is in fact absolutely correct.
II
The most impressive and complete alternative to Gregory's
vision to come down to us from the golden age of the church
fathers would certainly be Augustine's, as I have already
noted. The City of God constitutes the most systematic, most
brilliantly constructed, most gracefully written account of
the gospel not as the glorious epic of rescue and restoration
that it was for Gregory and others of his ilk, but instead as a
strange and compelling tragicomedy, fraught with only par-
tially dispelled shadows, consummated not in the perfect har-
mony of all beings (as envisaged by Gregory), but rather in
an ultimate division and unreconciled dissonance between a
realm of resplendent beauty and another of abysmal misery.
It is grand and grim and somehow gorgeous. And, as I have
made obvious to this point, and shall continue to make obvi-
ous below, I have any number of intellectual and critical rea-
sons for rejecting the story that Augustine tells there, at least
in its closing phases-any number of philosophical complaints
to make against it, any number of objections to the scriptural
hermeneutics informing it, and so on - but, in the end, it is
my most spontaneously affective reason for rejecting it that
remains paramount for me: it is a tale that seems to me to re-
duce all of existence to a cruel absurdity. If the story really does
end as Augustine and countless others over the centuries have